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St Peter
and St Paul, Brockdish

When I
first visited this church in 2005, it was with
something of a sinking heart to arrive at the
third church in a row that was locked without a
keyholder notice. Today, nothing could be further
from the truth. In the south porch there is a
large notice now which reads Come in and
enjoy your church! Fabulous stuff.

The trim graveyard
includes some substantial memorials to the Kay
family, including one massive structure with an
angel under a spire which would not look out of
place opposite the Royal Albert Hall. No expense
was spared by the Victorians here at Brockdish.
The rebuilding was paid for by the Rector, George
France, who also advised architect Frederick
Marable on exactly what form this vision of the
medieval should take. The tower above is
curiously un-East Anglian, looking rather unusual
surrounded by Norfolk fields. All around the
building headstops are splendid, and fine details
like faux-consecration crosses on the porch show
that France was generally a man who knew what a
medieval church should look like.

It will not
surprise you to learn that St Peter and St Paul is
similarly grand on the inside, if a touch severe. France
actually devised a church much more Anglo-catholic than
we find it today; it was toned down by the militantly low
church Kay family later in the century. They took down
the rood and replaced it with a simple cross, painting
out the figures on the rood screen as well. When I first
visited, the very helpful churchwarden who'd opened up
for me observed that Brockdish is the only church in
Norfolk that has stained glass in every window, which
isn't strictly true (Harleston, three miles away, has as well) but we can
be thankful that, thanks to the Reverend France's
fortunes, it is of a very good quality. The glass seems
to have been an ongoing project, because some of it dates
from the 1920s. In keeping with low church tradition, the
glass depicts mainly Biblical scenes and sayings of
Christ rather than Saints, apart from the church's two
patron Saints in the east window of the chancel. There
are also some roundels in the east window of the south
aisle, which appear to be of continental glass. They
depict the Adoration of the Magi, the deposition of
Christ, what appears to be Paharoah's daughter with the
infant Moses, and the heads of St Matthias, St John the
Evangelist, and Christ with a Crown of Thorns. However, I
suspect that at least some of them are the work of the
King workshop of Norwich, and that only the Deposition
and the Old Testament scene are genuinely old.

If this is rather a
gloomy church on a dark day, it is because of the glass
in the south clerestory, a surprisingly un-medieval
detail - the whole point of a clerestory was to let light
reach the rood. The glass here is partly heraldic, partly
symbolic. The stalls in the chancel are another
faux-medieval detail - there was never a college of
Priests here - but they looked suspiciously as if they
might contain old bench ends within the woodwork. Not all
is false, because the chancel also contains an unusual
survival from the earlier church, a tombchest which may
have been intended as an Easter Sepulchre.

Above all, the
atmosphere is at once homely and devotional, not least
because of the exceptional quality of the tiled
sanctuary, an increasingly rare beast because they were
so often removed in the 1960s and 1970s, when Victorian
interiors were unfashionable. Brockdish's is spectacular,
a splendid example that has caught the attention of 19th
century tile enthusiasts and experts nationally.

Also tiled
is the area beneath the tower, which France had
reordered as a baptistery. The font has recently
been moved back into the body of the church;
presumably, whoever supplies the church's
liability insurance had doubts about godparents
standing with their backs to the steps down into
the nave.

I liked Brockdish church a lot; I
don't suppose it gets a lot of visitors, but it
is a fine example of what the Victorians did
right.